311–320 of 566 posts
If you want to help support right to repair (in US) consider donating to Louis Rossmann's GoFundMe for right to repair: https://www.gofundme.com/f/lets-get-right-to-repair-passed?u...
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We used to have this right, but it feels like somewhere between 2010-2015, companies realized they could make more money by disallowing simple replacements. I used to make some money as a kid by buying batches of broken Iphone 3G/3GS's on ebay, replacing parts on them, and then re-selling them myself. Practically any part of that device could be replaced in less than 30 minutes with $15 worth of tools. I have a 2012M…
I draw the line at SMDs. We should go back to through-hole components — I can desolder and resolder those. Sorry, I'm not trying to mock you. Just saw an opportunity to be facetious, not facetious. And, actually, to sort of make a point: I don't buy into the idea that companies are intentionally doing this — intentionally disallowing replacement parts, although I maybe just be naive. I do in fact loathe SMDs (as a ho…
SMDs are not anticonsumer. They are harder to work with but with practice anyone can deal with them just fine. I've yet to see anyone argue for a through hole mandate.
But I have seen people argue for banning clearly anti repair design practices like gluing assemblies together. Or designing a screen in such a way that you have a high chance of breaking it when removing it.
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5 year old laptops are repairable, but fewer and fewer new ones are not. I've been in the market recently and it's extremely frustrating trying to find a laptop that doesn't have the RAM soldered in place. Sure, it can technically be desoldered, but that's not how it used to be.
I'm hunting for a new laptop just now, and just about everything has at least one DIMM soldered, with many having both soldered. Driving me nuts! Is there a convincing technical reason why everybody is doing this nowadays?
And I 100% blame Apple for this. IMO, Apple is not a tech company, but a fashion company. Or more accurately, they produce technology that's optimized to be fashionable. Thin laptops are more sleek, but to make them thinner will require parts to be soldered to the motherboard, since an actual slot will add 3mm or whatever.
Other companies feel like they have to match Apple, and so they follow suit.
The thing is, AFAIK, nobody is asking for laptops to be only 0.63 inches (16.1 mm) thick, but that's what people are buying. Apple advertises how thin the MacBook Air is, and the masses go wild over it.
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But their parent wasn't (in fact, they mentioned x86 and AMD, which are integrated circuits). Look at a random PC (or, until recently, a random laptop): it's made from a lot of individual components that can be swapped out or upgraded independently. Storage, RAM, CPU, GPU, cooling, motherboard, WiFi chip, Bluetooth chip, speakers, microphone, screen, all the peripherals - they're all designed to work together as a ca…
>These options are not being made available in the first place. Could it be because it's not financially feasible? If you present the idea of a repairable alternative to an iPad, are any investors going to take you up on it? I think a big aspect of this whole debate is that manufacturing efficiencies have gone up so much, that it's simply not economically worth it to sacrifice the resiliency and cost effectiveness of…
I vote yes for right to repair, both with my dollar and my desire to favor the rights of the citizens of this country.
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Electronics used to come with full schematics as part of the documentation. As an example, this (1) is how the manual looks for a ~1970-1974 stereo record player I have. You have diagrams of the boards and lists of parts as in individual caps, etc. We should strive to move in that direction, not away from it. Permanently locked bootloaders, DRM for componets, etc. are a move in the oposite direction. To move the over…
I see a good intention behind it, but it only works only if only honest people and companies exist. It’s not the case in real world. What would prevent a competitor simply copying the whole product and offering a cheaper price because they didn’t have to invest in R&D, and those engineers who spent many years working on a finished schematics will be out of job because the company won’t be able to make a living sellin…
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This is exactly why “Right to repair” rose up to claw that ownership back. If we don’t create laws, at some point down the road we will go from “not much recourse” to literally none. What if Apple created a phone with no ports that was filled with epoxy as the last step in assembly? What if powering it on at all meant logging in to your apple account? They could in every meaningful way take that device away from you…
If that would happen, and it bothers you, just don't buy an Apple phone. Problem solved.
Don’t buy a laptop? A car? A building? A slab of wood?
Yes, my examples are borderline unreasonable, but we’re already at the level of unreasonable products being licensed instead of owned (Tractors, DSLRs).
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But their parent wasn't (in fact, they mentioned x86 and AMD, which are integrated circuits). Look at a random PC (or, until recently, a random laptop): it's made from a lot of individual components that can be swapped out or upgraded independently. Storage, RAM, CPU, GPU, cooling, motherboard, WiFi chip, Bluetooth chip, speakers, microphone, screen, all the peripherals - they're all designed to work together as a ca…
>These options are not being made available in the first place. Could it be because it's not financially feasible? If you present the idea of a repairable alternative to an iPad, are any investors going to take you up on it? I think a big aspect of this whole debate is that manufacturing efficiencies have gone up so much, that it's simply not economically worth it to sacrifice the resiliency and cost effectiveness of…
I believe all of that is true.
Which is why this needs to be corrected by regulation. If making a more user-respecting and environmentally-friendly products isn't economical enough for the market to do it on its own, the economical landscape needs to be altered so that it is.
> as a seller, you get to keep costs low when you have to spend less on dealing with people tinkering with it and then sending it in for warranty
This must be solvable, because somehow it isn't a problem on the PC market, or on the car market.
> Efficiency is frequently a trade off for a word that I can't think of, but maybe can be described as "security" or "local security".
"Distribution" and "decentralization" are the words you're thinking of. Despite the common propaganda to the contrary, centralization is usually increasing efficiency. That's why the market loves it so much (and why every country ends up with laws to limit it). The cost to that efficiency is usually resilience (failure of any single actor becomes a large-scale issue) and slower innovation (bigger actors take less risks, smaller actors tend to cover more of the possibility space, by virtue of numbers).
> It's similar to not needing a butcher, produce market, shoe store once a Walmart Supercenter rolls into town.
And it is a contentious issue. On the one hand, the food gets cheaper. On the other, the jobs get worse, the local community suffers, and money gets siphoned off the local economy. On an international scale, the same thing is called "globalization", which is both widely praised and criticized. In particular, the current pandemic has revealed the resilience problem of our globalized economy, which is why so many countries are now making moves towards reversing it a bit.
If you want to help support right to repair (in US) consider donating to Louis Rossmann's GoFundMe for right to repair: https://www.gofundme.com/f/lets-get-right-to-repair-passed?u...
https://www.gofundme.com/f/lets-get-right-to-repair-passed?u...
It was created by Louis Rossmann who has a Mac repair shop in NY.
He talks a lot about it on his YT channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/rossmanngroup
Linus Tech Tips did a video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvVafMi0l68&t=5s